


And He Saw It Was Good

by RobinLorin



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-22
Updated: 2014-07-22
Packaged: 2018-02-10 00:19:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2003598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobinLorin/pseuds/RobinLorin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Excerpts from a steampunk Musketeers AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And He Saw It Was Good

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for body horror (immobility, Doc Oc-type metal insertions).

The wet summer heat is heavy in the air as d’Artagnan watches his father walk toward him from the house. He clutches his horse’s head in his arms. The horse whinnies desperately and lips at d’Artagnan’s arm. 

“Can’t we fix him, father?” he asks. 

His father shakes his head. “Horses don't take to enhancements the way we do.” His long, metal fingers nimbly line up the trigger. “Once a horse breaks, there’s no fixing it.” 

D’Artagnan watches his father turn the dial on the repulsed pistol. “Please, father.” 

“Step back,” his father warns. 

“But -- “

“Step away!” 

D’Artagnan lets go of his horse and scrambles back. He shuts his eyes as his father touches the pistol to the horse’s neck. A crack, and the smell of burning flesh. D’Artagnan imagines he can feel the shock travel through the earth, through his body. 

His father’s natural hand settles on d’Artagnan’s head. “Remember, lad, there’s a point to which we can fix things. Enhancements are God’s way of preserving autolytic life, not creating new.” 

 

When d’Artagnan settles in the city, he’s astounded by the sheer amount of enhancements. He knows he looks like a bumpkin, gaping at everything, but it all shines so well: the mechanized arm of the woman at the market; the gleaming chestplate of the guard passing by. 

Porthos has an enhanced eye; his left. D’Artagnan enviously watches it zoom in and out, its pupil retracting and enlarging as he uses it to see his opponents’ cards. 

Athos shakes his head when d’Artagnan mentions it. “Porthos had to lose an eye to gain that one,” he says. “Enhancements are to prolong life, not to be added frivolously." 

“You sound like my father,” d’Artagnan grumbles. He can’t help but track Porthos’ eye, even when it starts to leak. Porthos curses and dashes the fluid away. Later Athos will knock him out and Aramis will refill his eye cavity. D’Artagnan will gag on the smell of vitreous humours mixing with oil, and Aramis will smile grimly at Porthos’ unseeing eye, sharing a joke with himself. 

Still, the wonders of the eye outweigh any of d’Artagnan’s revulsion. And a day later Porthos will be up again, his eyepatch off and his eye spinning. 

“Wait till you get the coat,” Porthos says, rapping his knuckles on his own coat of arms on his hard leather carapace. He does a leaping twist and lands again in the same spot, shattering the earth beneath him. 

“He’s a show-off,” says Aramis. “Me, on the other hand…” 

D’Artagnan barely has time to register Aramis’ smirk before Aramis is gone. D’Artagnan looks around. A piece of whittled wood falls on his head and he looks up to see Aramis ten feet up in a tree. “To each Musketeer, their own enhancement,” Aramis says. 

“Not a show-off at all,” says d’Artagnan. He looks to Athos for another display, eager to see Athos’ enhancement. 

Athos says nothing, and hunches closer to the fire. 

 

 

They find Ninon in her parlor, lecturing a group of captivated young ladies. As d’Artagnan turns his eye to them, he can spot enhancements featured prominently on each. One young lady has a metal arm entirely unhidden by flesh or fabric. Another has an eye much like Porthos’, only hers is trained to the needlework in her lap which she threads at a speed too quick for d’Artagnan to follow. 

"We must learn what men have kept from us!" Ninon is saying. "They wish for us to be content with autolytic life, withering and dying as natural women. But as we learn of our bodies, so we can improve them!" 

Ninon taps the girl with the needlepoint on the head, and the girl smiles without looking up. She completes another row of stitches in the time it takes Ninon to move away. 

“Men have long ruled the mechanized sciences. We must claim what is ours by right.” 

Ninon is interrupted by her hydrolautic servant, who introduces the Musketeers. She seems annoyed by their presence, and she interrupts Athos when he bows. 

“I know who you are; I’ve seen you in court. There is a memorable melancholy aspect to your looks, though judging by your lack of enhancements it may only be mental vacancy.” 

“Do you judge all men’s intelligence by their enhancements?” 

The girls around them giggle at Athos’ dry innuendo. Ninon smiles slyly. 

“Men have access to all enhancements. Women, on the other hand, are only given enhancements that men think they need. I am more prepared to judge a woman on her enhancements, since she is likely to have done them herself.” 

Ninon draws aside her hair and reveals her metallic spine, silver flashing in the bright light of the room. 

“You see, that is what I teach here, gentlemen. Whatever accusation the cardinal has raised against me, I guarantee that he is only endangered by our liberty.” 

Later, after the Musketeers have brought her down from the pyre, Ninon wears a cloak to cover her melted back and the bared metal of her legs. She smells of overheated metal, like a broken engine-carriage. 

Her enhanced toes peek out from underneath the cloak, and her metal fingers clutch the edges around her. D’Artagnan eyes all that metal and wonders if Athos feels revulsion at having flirted with a woman so close to becoming a hydrolaut. He remembers his father’s words: enhancements are for preserving life. 

Ninon has gone beyond that, fixing herself when God’s work was enough, and now all her humanity is contained only in her natural organs and her defiant face. 

 

 

The last time d’Artagnan holds his father, he’s on the ground, once again clutching a dying beast to his breast. The hydrolaut that called its creator Athos rides away, leaving d’Artagnan alone in the mud and the rain, crouching on the bloody ground.

His father’s enhanced hand claws at d’Artagnan’s face, cutting his skin. Then the hand falls away as the neurosensors disconnect. The natural eyes, ones d’Artagnan has inherited and never enhanced, glaze over. 

His father’s breath wheezes from his broken throat. D’Artagnan covers the hole in his father’s side with his hands, but his natural flesh is too fragile and his blood flows into the mud, around d’Artagnan’s boots, staining his cloak. 

A dull light from above softens his father’s face, turning the bloody ropes of spit to delicate watercolor. D’Artagnan squints at the rain and sees a helioship descending, shining a smoky tallow light and coming closer, closer, until the light engulfs him and the dying body in his arms. 

 

 

When they run into the execution ground to stop Athos’ murder, they find him on his knees, his eyes shut and his back bloody. His geared locket swings loosely from his neck. 

The red guards lower their weapons on the cardinal’s sharp command, but they stay in their places. Their cold eye-holes stare rigidly at their target. 

Aramis and Porthos haul Athos to his feet. He’s gasping, his lips blue and his forehead pearled with sweat. 

Aramis nods to the discarded Musketeer jacket at the edge of the execution yard. “Quickly!” 

D’Artagnan grabs the jacket and shoves it at Aramis. Together he and Porthos slide the jacket over Athos’ shoulders. Athos grunts, his back arching. A high whine echoes in d’Artagnan’s ears, quickly, and then it’s gone. 

Athos staggers out of his friends’ grasp and tightens his jacket around himself. 

 

 

They tie Labarge to their horses and lead him to Paris. His knee joints compress and hiss with each step, and the natural skin covering his metal arms bulges as he wrestles against the reinforced rope. The rope holds, for now. LaBarge has enhanced his entire body over the years, and now they must reach Paris before his metal muscles break the restraints. 

“He’s nearly a hydrolaut,” Aramis says with distaste. “There’s a point where a man stops being a man.” 

LaBarge’s eyes are too natural to be enhanced. They have all the hate and cunning of a human, and when they fix on d’Artagnan, they narrow as the mouth below them drops open in an uneven, hydraulic leer. 

The red guards stop them as they enter the city. The one with a stripe on his sleeve rides forward and unhinges his jaw. The mouth stays open, unmoving, as a natural voice emerges, echoing from within its metal throat. 

“The cardinal orders the prisoner be transferred to his cell.” The voice sounds pleasant, at odds with the cold slant of the guard’s face. D’Artagnan wonders if the guard had been pretty before he had volunteered for the cardinal’s service. 

“That’s what we’re doing,” says Porthos. “Move along.” 

The hydrolaut doesn’t move. “The cardinal orders the red guard to apprehend the prisoner.” 

Porthos curls his lips. "Well, the cardinal didn't program me. I'm not his bolt bucket."

The red guard’s eyes glint in the light. "You will hand over the prisoner." 

Porthos shrugs. "Your reassembly." 

LaBarge decimates the red guards within seconds. His mechanic fists and steam-powered muscles crush the guards to scrap. 

When he’s done, the ‘auts scattered at his feet, he raises his head and looks at the Musketeers. His eyes shine with autolytic joy and bloodlust. D’Artagnan shivers once before Athos administers the pistol shock to the back of LaBarge’s head and he drops, unconscious, his enhanced limbs pulling him heavily to the cobblestones below. 

 

 

After the duel, after LaBarge is dead, they gather in the Musketeers training yard. Aramis takes the armband off d’Artagnan’s sleeve. He removes d’Artagnan’s coat and tosses it away. 

Treville comes out of his office carrying a new jacket: gleaming leather and metal, its nodes hiding coyly inside the lining like grinning teeth. 

D’Artagnan hold out his arms and they slip it on him. Athos grips his arm, Aramis his neck. D’Artagnan nods. Porthos connects the jacket. 

D’Artagnan jolts as the sharp points of the nodes embrace his spine, curling into his skin and locking into place beside his bone and muscle. 

D’Artagnan keeps his eyes open even as his vision whites out, gritting his teeth through the screaming of his nerves, the white-hot sensation of his body, as if his skin has been sloughed off, as if his father’s repulsed pistol has fired into him at close range. The world beyond his torso disappears, and d’Artagnan is only aware that he is standing because the hands on his arm and neck keep him grounded. Nothing exists but d’Artagnan and those steady pressures. 

The pain stops, all at once, and d’Artagnan’s vision clears. Nothing hurts anymore. Nothing feels anymore. 

D’Artagnan locks eyes with Treville as Aramis replaces the armband on d’Artagnan’s bicep. Treville nods once. “Welcome to the Musketeers,” he says. 

 

 

D’Artagnan sits down beside his father’s enhancement chamber. He can just touch his father’s fingertips where they peek out from under the wooden slabs that hold him upright. 

“I avenged our farm, father,” he says. "LaBarge is dead."

His father doesn’t respond. His mouth is full of metal tubing. The great bellows lining his lungs expand and retract, giving him breath. 

He had almost bled out that night at the hotel, but they ship had docked beside them soon enough to hook him up to an life-reparation unit. Now he lies in an enhancement chamber, his wound plugged and his body unmoving but for his natural, human eyes. 

“I’m a Musketeer now,” d’Artagnan says. His voice echoes in the enhancement suite, its bare walls rolling his words back to him. “I’ve got the jacket and everything.” He rolls his shoulders and feels the metal twitch in his skin, like burrowing rodents disturbed in their slumber; biting at him with sharp teeth before settling again in his marrow. 

D'Artagnan pats his fathers hand. He thinks it might twitch, but dismisses it. Everyone knows that you can't move in a preservation suit. The only thing left for his father is enhancement. 

D’Artagnan rises. “I’ll visit again next week,” he promises. 

D’Artagnan ducks close and brushes a kiss on the only natural skin left on his father, just above his eye. His father’s eye rolls wildly, his eyelashes fluttering against d’Artagnan’s skin. 

D'Artagnan withdraws and leaves the ward, passing each patient in their suits, immobile and enhanced for as long as they live.

**Author's Note:**

> Fun with pseuedo-Greek! 
> 
> autolytic - decomposing naturally (all human)  
> hydrolaut - a being made of water-based technology

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Animus](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2018001) by [paklalat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paklalat/pseuds/paklalat)




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